Rebecca Brown is a Catholic convert, which retroactively makes her phenomenal short-story collection The Terrible Girls eligible for DESERT HEARTS and, imho, GROSS INDECENCY.
For THERE ARE DOZENS OF US! I'll recommend Greg Coles's Single Gay Christian, Greg Johnson's Still Time to Care, Bridget Eileen Rivera's Heavy Burdens, and--a fellow traveler--Tim Otto's Oriented to Faith.
Realized St Bernard also counts for NONE OF THESE WORDS ARE IN THE BIBLE.
MORE LIFE recommendations would include Michael O'Loughlin's Hidden Mercy, Andrew Sullivan's Love Undetectable, Rebecca Brown's Gifts of the Body :/, and the one I would do for this challenge myself because I need to reread it, Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Separate Rooms. Oh and Jose Luis Zarate's The Route of Ice and Salt.
VICAR IN A TUTU: how can I forget Gerard Manley Hopkins; also Matteo Ricci's On Friendship: 100 Maxims for a Chinese Prince.
IN THE RUINS OF RIEVAULX: lol Spiritual Friendship by St Aelred obviously; also the Life of St Aelred by good ol' Walter. Jesus as Mother by Caroline Walker Bynum. St Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs. THE FRIEND BY ALAN BRAY.
FOUCAULT: Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity; Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century; Frederick W. Roden, Same-Sex Love in Victorian Religious Culture; Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World.
NEAR EAST: Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium; I've been putting off reading The Pillar and Ground of the Truth but maybe one of you people will get there first.
VICAR IN A TUTU: anything by Wesley Hill or Fr Henri Nouwen
GROSS INDECENCY: Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
VIRGIN TREES: St Methodius, Symposium; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; Augustine's Confessions.
DESERT HEARTS: Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks
FAKE AND GAY: Okay, its relevance to Christian life is extremely tangential, but Florence King's When Sisterhood Was in Flower is one of the single funniest novels I've ever read, and it's set within a feminist commune co-founded by slutty, bisexual conservative Isabel and prudish progressive Polly. Apparently the version in The Florence King Reader, which is the one I read, is a lot better than the version published on its own.
Also seconding Brideshead Revisited, the dowager empress of queer Catholic lit.
Hi Eve! As a bi Catholic who works for a public library, I'm very here (and queer) for it and looking forward to folks' suggestions. The past year has been possibly my gayest year of reading thus far, with my first dives into bi and queer theory as well as the start of what I guess will be a lengthy Fr. James Alison obsession. (I think any of his works would be worthy suggestions for Bridges Across the Divide, but I found On Being Liked to be really spiritually nourishing.)
Strangely, though, I'm finding a lot of similarities with the children's fantasy I've been drawn to visit or revisit more recently, as well as my past ventures into Eastern mysticism (strongly recommend The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement for consideration as either Eastern or early Church reading, though it is an endeavor), mainly an acceptance and comfort in mystery and difference, as well as that air of melancholy that seems unavoidable in so much gay literature.
Anyway, this is all to say I think I've inadvertently taken on this reading challenge in my attempts to connect these varied aspects of myself and my faith, and I feel the more whole for it. Happy reading!
PS: I was astounded when I finally read the lauded Brideshead Revisited a few years back to find a work In the Canon both so unambiguously gay and Catholic.
A couple of suggestions for 'Go tell it on the mountain':
-- Lord Dismiss Us, by Michael Campbell, 1967. The story of an intense first love between two boys ages sixteen and eighteen at a minor English public school. The younger boy is a devout Anglican and aims to become a vicar, and the two boys resolve to keep their love chaste. Meanwhile the rest of the school is a hotbed of homosexual love and lust and much fun is poked at the new headmaster's blinkered campaign against it.
-- David Blaize, by Edward Frederic Benson, 1916. Another of those English public school stories, wittier and more down to earth than most of its contemporaries. David, our hero, finds love with his own schoolboy hero Frank, his response of instinctive, baffled, innocent withdrawal in response to the other boy's sexual advances bringing Frank out of a life of homosex and into one of noble, chaste friendship with David: "You've made it easier for me to be decent ... And if it was cheeky, the other name for that is salvation."
For both 'Fake and gay' and 'Gross indecency':
-- The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. Laurie, a young soldier wounded at Dunkirk, falls in love with Andrew, a Quaker conscientious objector working at his military hospital. They develop a deep friendship and it becomes clear that Andrew reciprocates Laurie's feelings, but in order not to burden Andrew, Laurie holds back from declaring himself. In any case Andrew is a 'Side B' Christian, as is his fiftysomething gay (or bi?) mentor Dave. Laurie himself is not Side B and is not sure that he is even Christian, but he wants to support Andrew's moral choices: "Anyone who goes in for Christianity on weekdays isn't really taking it so soft. I believe enough in him as a person to feel I'd like to help him be what he wants to be, if that's possible. Not hinder, anyway." Meanwhile Laurie's schoolboy crush Ralph reenters his life. Ralph had an abusive religious upbringing, retains intense and complicated feelings about Christianity and is also decidedly not Side B. Laurie is strongly attracted to Ralph but wary of his possessive and domineering nature...A note about this book: Renault was required to edit it for the first US edition and that edition, with about fifty pages cut, has been used as the basis of all subsequent reprints. It's hard nowadays to get a copy of the original 1953 text printed by Longmans, but anyone who can should, as the cuts tend to flatten some of the characters, especially Andrew, and render some scenes a little unclear. In her next novel, The Last of the Wine, published in 1956, set in ancient Athens and following an imaginary disciple of Socrates, Renault again examined chaste love between men, and that book ends with Plato's famous quote predicting the advent and crucifixion of Christ. Even as late as 1969, in her near-hagiographic novel Fire From Heaven, Renault portrayed her young Alexander the Great as drawn to, though ultimately deciding against, the idea of a chaste love with his boyfriend Hephaistion.
For both 'The friend my childhood promised me' and 'They were roommates!'
-- Something by Rosemary Sutcliff, the doyenne of children's historical fiction and a pioneer of disabled representation in fiction -- she had Still's disease and used a wheelchair for much of her life. Much of her work depicts deep friendship between men: I guess the best for this, and also some of her finest books, are Warrior Scarlet; Frontier Wolf; Sun Horse, Moon Horse, which also contains quite a lot on pre-Christian blood atonemet sacrifice; The Eagle of the Ninth; Simon; Blood Feud; and The Shining Company. Her Sword at Sunset, a realistic retelling of the Arthur legend written for adults, contains both a committed, loving non-sexual friendship between Artos/Arthur and his Lancelot figure, Bedwyr, and a sexual relationship between two of Artos's best fighters, which alas! also falls under 'Tragic gays'.
For 'Get the Foucault of here!'
-- Has to be Khaled El-Rouayheb's Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-1800.
For GROSS INDECENCY, obviously you can just read something by or about Our Oscar himself. I love almost all Wilde (some of the shorter nonfiction is boring, or silly in a bad way). As for Wildeana, the only novel I've read about him wasn't good (The God of Mirrors). The Ellmann biography was standard when I read it, and I'm not sure if it's been surpassed. Joseph Pearce wrote a pleasurably table-pounding case for Wilde as Catholic, which iirc is called Unmasking Oscar Wilde. It has some insights, but needs the corrective provided by... I can't remember if it's in Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, which I've already recommended, or Ellis Hansen's Decadence and Catholicism, which isn't as good but iirc has more about Wilde and his involvement in queer culture/activism.
For VICAR IN A TUTU or DESERT HEARTS, I'll say Nina Bouraoui's Tomboy. Doesn't have anything about Our Lord in it, that I recall, but it's a great little book that should be better-known. Would also work for GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN.
WOMAN, BEHOLD YOUR SON: Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes; Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance. (Is this item specifically for Grant Hartley? maybe)
Also Laura Swan, The Wisdom of the Beguines; and, for practical advice, Leah Libresco Sargeant's Building the Benedict Option.
I would also argue that Dennis Coupland's Generation X belongs on this shelf, if only in the way that the vase in the optical illusion reveals, by its absence, the presence of the two faces.
I'm desperate to find a way to cram Michelangelo and Max Jacob in here somewhere. I suppose both did in fact live under criminalization. And how.
If you want something unexpected for THERE ARE DOZENS OF US, Gabriel Blanchard has a collection of poetry, a vampire novel, and a collection of apocalyptic fiction.
For GET THE FOUCAULT OF HERE, a lot of people have recommended How to Be Gay. Haven't read it!
And from my Amazon wish list, so I haven't read these yet either... I'm guessing that Mark Jordan's Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires would work for either FOUCAULT or BRIDGES ACROSS.
For NONE OF THESE WORDS or VICAR IN A TUTU, there's a book called The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, looking at excerpts from his poetry, letters, journals and more.
And last: for FAKE AND GAY or THEY WERE ROOMMATES!, Margaret Wander Bonanno's Dwellers in the Crucible is a Star Trek tie-in novel (you're welcome) centering on a cross-species friendship of two women who become t'hyla, aka Vulcan soulmates. Caveat lector, they are hostages when this happens and there's fairly harsh reference to rape. Still, you know, I thought some of you might appreciate something a little less constructive and respectable.
Rebecca Brown is a Catholic convert, which retroactively makes her phenomenal short-story collection The Terrible Girls eligible for DESERT HEARTS and, imho, GROSS INDECENCY.
For THERE ARE DOZENS OF US! I'll recommend Greg Coles's Single Gay Christian, Greg Johnson's Still Time to Care, Bridget Eileen Rivera's Heavy Burdens, and--a fellow traveler--Tim Otto's Oriented to Faith.
Realized St Bernard also counts for NONE OF THESE WORDS ARE IN THE BIBLE.
MORE LIFE recommendations would include Michael O'Loughlin's Hidden Mercy, Andrew Sullivan's Love Undetectable, Rebecca Brown's Gifts of the Body :/, and the one I would do for this challenge myself because I need to reread it, Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Separate Rooms. Oh and Jose Luis Zarate's The Route of Ice and Salt.
VICAR IN A TUTU: how can I forget Gerard Manley Hopkins; also Matteo Ricci's On Friendship: 100 Maxims for a Chinese Prince.
Sure ok, I have a minute so...
IN THE RUINS OF RIEVAULX: lol Spiritual Friendship by St Aelred obviously; also the Life of St Aelred by good ol' Walter. Jesus as Mother by Caroline Walker Bynum. St Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs. THE FRIEND BY ALAN BRAY.
FOUCAULT: Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity; Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century; Frederick W. Roden, Same-Sex Love in Victorian Religious Culture; Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World.
NEAR EAST: Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium; I've been putting off reading The Pillar and Ground of the Truth but maybe one of you people will get there first.
VICAR IN A TUTU: anything by Wesley Hill or Fr Henri Nouwen
GROSS INDECENCY: Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
AGAINST NATURE: Let me throw this out there: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164212/the-life-and-struggles-of-our-mother-walatta-petros The 17th-c biography of a woman canonized in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; tres problematique, iirc she blames lesbianism for the plague, but she also had a truly deep love for a spiritual sister.
VIRGIN TREES: St Methodius, Symposium; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; Augustine's Confessions.
DESERT HEARTS: Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks
FAKE AND GAY: Okay, its relevance to Christian life is extremely tangential, but Florence King's When Sisterhood Was in Flower is one of the single funniest novels I've ever read, and it's set within a feminist commune co-founded by slutty, bisexual conservative Isabel and prudish progressive Polly. Apparently the version in The Florence King Reader, which is the one I read, is a lot better than the version published on its own.
Also seconding Brideshead Revisited, the dowager empress of queer Catholic lit.
Gotta run but might do more later....
Hi Eve! As a bi Catholic who works for a public library, I'm very here (and queer) for it and looking forward to folks' suggestions. The past year has been possibly my gayest year of reading thus far, with my first dives into bi and queer theory as well as the start of what I guess will be a lengthy Fr. James Alison obsession. (I think any of his works would be worthy suggestions for Bridges Across the Divide, but I found On Being Liked to be really spiritually nourishing.)
Strangely, though, I'm finding a lot of similarities with the children's fantasy I've been drawn to visit or revisit more recently, as well as my past ventures into Eastern mysticism (strongly recommend The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement for consideration as either Eastern or early Church reading, though it is an endeavor), mainly an acceptance and comfort in mystery and difference, as well as that air of melancholy that seems unavoidable in so much gay literature.
Anyway, this is all to say I think I've inadvertently taken on this reading challenge in my attempts to connect these varied aspects of myself and my faith, and I feel the more whole for it. Happy reading!
PS: I was astounded when I finally read the lauded Brideshead Revisited a few years back to find a work In the Canon both so unambiguously gay and Catholic.
A couple of suggestions for 'Go tell it on the mountain':
-- Lord Dismiss Us, by Michael Campbell, 1967. The story of an intense first love between two boys ages sixteen and eighteen at a minor English public school. The younger boy is a devout Anglican and aims to become a vicar, and the two boys resolve to keep their love chaste. Meanwhile the rest of the school is a hotbed of homosexual love and lust and much fun is poked at the new headmaster's blinkered campaign against it.
-- David Blaize, by Edward Frederic Benson, 1916. Another of those English public school stories, wittier and more down to earth than most of its contemporaries. David, our hero, finds love with his own schoolboy hero Frank, his response of instinctive, baffled, innocent withdrawal in response to the other boy's sexual advances bringing Frank out of a life of homosex and into one of noble, chaste friendship with David: "You've made it easier for me to be decent ... And if it was cheeky, the other name for that is salvation."
For both 'Fake and gay' and 'Gross indecency':
-- The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. Laurie, a young soldier wounded at Dunkirk, falls in love with Andrew, a Quaker conscientious objector working at his military hospital. They develop a deep friendship and it becomes clear that Andrew reciprocates Laurie's feelings, but in order not to burden Andrew, Laurie holds back from declaring himself. In any case Andrew is a 'Side B' Christian, as is his fiftysomething gay (or bi?) mentor Dave. Laurie himself is not Side B and is not sure that he is even Christian, but he wants to support Andrew's moral choices: "Anyone who goes in for Christianity on weekdays isn't really taking it so soft. I believe enough in him as a person to feel I'd like to help him be what he wants to be, if that's possible. Not hinder, anyway." Meanwhile Laurie's schoolboy crush Ralph reenters his life. Ralph had an abusive religious upbringing, retains intense and complicated feelings about Christianity and is also decidedly not Side B. Laurie is strongly attracted to Ralph but wary of his possessive and domineering nature...A note about this book: Renault was required to edit it for the first US edition and that edition, with about fifty pages cut, has been used as the basis of all subsequent reprints. It's hard nowadays to get a copy of the original 1953 text printed by Longmans, but anyone who can should, as the cuts tend to flatten some of the characters, especially Andrew, and render some scenes a little unclear. In her next novel, The Last of the Wine, published in 1956, set in ancient Athens and following an imaginary disciple of Socrates, Renault again examined chaste love between men, and that book ends with Plato's famous quote predicting the advent and crucifixion of Christ. Even as late as 1969, in her near-hagiographic novel Fire From Heaven, Renault portrayed her young Alexander the Great as drawn to, though ultimately deciding against, the idea of a chaste love with his boyfriend Hephaistion.
For both 'The friend my childhood promised me' and 'They were roommates!'
-- Something by Rosemary Sutcliff, the doyenne of children's historical fiction and a pioneer of disabled representation in fiction -- she had Still's disease and used a wheelchair for much of her life. Much of her work depicts deep friendship between men: I guess the best for this, and also some of her finest books, are Warrior Scarlet; Frontier Wolf; Sun Horse, Moon Horse, which also contains quite a lot on pre-Christian blood atonemet sacrifice; The Eagle of the Ninth; Simon; Blood Feud; and The Shining Company. Her Sword at Sunset, a realistic retelling of the Arthur legend written for adults, contains both a committed, loving non-sexual friendship between Artos/Arthur and his Lancelot figure, Bedwyr, and a sexual relationship between two of Artos's best fighters, which alas! also falls under 'Tragic gays'.
For 'Get the Foucault of here!'
-- Has to be Khaled El-Rouayheb's Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-1800.
By popular (one person) demand!
For GROSS INDECENCY, obviously you can just read something by or about Our Oscar himself. I love almost all Wilde (some of the shorter nonfiction is boring, or silly in a bad way). As for Wildeana, the only novel I've read about him wasn't good (The God of Mirrors). The Ellmann biography was standard when I read it, and I'm not sure if it's been surpassed. Joseph Pearce wrote a pleasurably table-pounding case for Wilde as Catholic, which iirc is called Unmasking Oscar Wilde. It has some insights, but needs the corrective provided by... I can't remember if it's in Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, which I've already recommended, or Ellis Hansen's Decadence and Catholicism, which isn't as good but iirc has more about Wilde and his involvement in queer culture/activism.
For VICAR IN A TUTU or DESERT HEARTS, I'll say Nina Bouraoui's Tomboy. Doesn't have anything about Our Lord in it, that I recall, but it's a great little book that should be better-known. Would also work for GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN.
WOMAN, BEHOLD YOUR SON: Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes; Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance. (Is this item specifically for Grant Hartley? maybe)
Also Laura Swan, The Wisdom of the Beguines; and, for practical advice, Leah Libresco Sargeant's Building the Benedict Option.
I would also argue that Dennis Coupland's Generation X belongs on this shelf, if only in the way that the vase in the optical illusion reveals, by its absence, the presence of the two faces.
I'm desperate to find a way to cram Michelangelo and Max Jacob in here somewhere. I suppose both did in fact live under criminalization. And how.
If you want something unexpected for THERE ARE DOZENS OF US, Gabriel Blanchard has a collection of poetry, a vampire novel, and a collection of apocalyptic fiction.
For GET THE FOUCAULT OF HERE, a lot of people have recommended How to Be Gay. Haven't read it!
And from my Amazon wish list, so I haven't read these yet either... I'm guessing that Mark Jordan's Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires would work for either FOUCAULT or BRIDGES ACROSS.
For NONE OF THESE WORDS or VICAR IN A TUTU, there's a book called The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, looking at excerpts from his poetry, letters, journals and more.
And last: for FAKE AND GAY or THEY WERE ROOMMATES!, Margaret Wander Bonanno's Dwellers in the Crucible is a Star Trek tie-in novel (you're welcome) centering on a cross-species friendship of two women who become t'hyla, aka Vulcan soulmates. Caveat lector, they are hostages when this happens and there's fairly harsh reference to rape. Still, you know, I thought some of you might appreciate something a little less constructive and respectable.